Alex Merrett > Alex's Quotes

“There'll always be a market for shit, of course. Just look at Jeffrey Archer! He writes like old people fuck doesn't he?”
― Stephen King

“The horror of the Pit lay in the emergence from it, with the return of her will, her caring, and her feeling of the need for meaning before the return of meaning itself.”
― Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“The answer is not coming. I have to find an arbitrary point inside the spell of waiting, the open absence, and tear myself away. Leave, with no answer. Move on to the next question.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“Most photographers have some kind of verbal patter going on when they shoot: "Great. Turn to me. Big smile. Less shark eyes. Have fun with it. Not like that." Some photographers are compulsively effusive. "Beautiful. Amazing. Gorgeous! Ugh, so gorgeous!" they yell at shutter speed. If you are anything less than insane, you will realize this is not sincere. It's hard to take because it's more positive feedback than you've received in your entire life thrown at you in fifteen seconds. It would be like going jogging while someone rode next to you in a slow-moving car, yelling, "Yes! You are Carl Lewis! You're breaking a world record right now. Amazing! You are fast. You're going very fast, yes!”
― Tina Fey, Bossypants

“Language does this to our memories—simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Carpe diem' doesn't mean seize the day--it means something gentler and more sensible. 'Carpe diem' means pluck the day. Carpe, pluck. Seize the day would be "cape diem," if my school Latin servies. No R. Very different piece of advice. What Horace had in mind was that you should gently pull on the day's stem, as if it were, say, a wildflower or an olive, holding it with all the practiced care of your thumb and the side of your finger, which knows how to not crush easily crushed things--so that the day's stalk or stem undergoes increasing tension and draws to a thinness, and a tightness, and then snaps softly away at its weakest point, perhaps leaking a little milky sap, and the flower, or the fruit, is released in your hand. Pluck the cranberry or blueberry of the day tenderly free without damaging it, is what Horace meant--pick the day, harvest the day, reap the day, mow the day, forage the day. Don't freaking grab the day in your fist like a burger at a fairground and take a big chomping bite out of it. That's not the kind of man that Horace was.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

“[I]t may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“It was very bad for me that my deafness happened at around the same time as I discovered my clitoris.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“One might fancy that day, the London day, was just beginning. Like a woman who had slipped off her print dress and white apron to array herself in blue and pearls, the day changed, put off stuff, took gauze, changed to evening, and with the same sigh of exhilaration that a woman breathes, tumbling petticoats on the floor, it too shed dust, heat, colour; the traffic thinned; motor cars, tinkling, darting, succeeded the lumber of vans; and here and there among the thick foliage of the squares an intense light hung. I resign, the evening seemed to say, as it paled and faded above the battlements and prominences, moulded, pointed, of hotel, flat, and block of shops, I fade, she was beginning. I disappear, but London would have none of it, and rushed her bayonets into the sky, pinioned her, constrained her to partnership in her revelry.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“People fascinated by the idea of progress never suspect that every step forward is also a step on the way to the end and that behind all the joyous 'onward and upward' slogans lurks the lascivious voice of death urging us to make haste.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“When you work in a convenience store, people often look down on you for working there. I find this fascinating, and I like to look them in the face when they do this to me. And as i do so I always think: that's what a human is.”
― Sayaka Murata, コンビニ人間 [Konbini ningen]

“I feel about her the way Galileo did about the telescope. My feelings for her enlarge my feelings for other things.”
― Richard Stern, Other Men's Daughters

“But now I don't know any story, mine or anyone else's, that did not begin in the animal movement of a body - an inclination, a wound, an obliqueness, at times a brilliant move, often obscene instincts that came from far away. It's all written there already. The thoughts come afterward, and are always a belated map, to which, out of convention and weariness, we attribute some precision.”
― Alessandro Baricco, La Sposa giovane

“He visited Robert Schumann's grave to lay a wreath and he became so indebted by the purchase of a piano that he could not afford the journey home to his mother and sister at Christmas. Observing that his money always ran out fast, 'probably because it was so round', he sent in his place a volume of eight of his musical compositions...”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche

“I remember being scared that something must, surely, go wrong, if we were this happy, her and me, in the early days, when our love was settling into the shape of our lives like cake mixture reaching the corners of the tin as it swells and bakes.”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“Intact families sat in the blue wash of television light, tranquil, like drowned statues.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“Cigarettes are the punctuation marks of life. Now I live without punctuation, without rhythm. My life is a stupid avant-garde poem.

I live without cigarettes to mark a question. Without cigarettes that end as we get happily or dangerously close to an answer. Or to the absence of one. Exclamation cigarettes. Ellipsis cigarettes. I would like to smoke with the elegance of a semicolon.”
― Alejandro Zambra, My Documents

“Sometimes I believe that love dies but hope springs eternal. Sometimes I believe that hope dies but love springs eternal. Sometimes I believe that sex plus guilt equals love, and sometimes I believe that sex plus guilt equals good sex. Sometimes I believe that love is as natural as the tides, and sometimes I believe that love is an act of will. Sometimes I believe that some people are better at love than others, and sometimes I believe that everyone is faking it. Sometimes I believe that love is essential, and sometimes I believe that only reason love is essential is that otherwise you spend all your time looking for it.”
― Nora Ephron, Heartburn

“Men go through life telling themselves a moment must come when they will show what they're made of. And the moment comes, and they do show. And they spend the rest of their days explaining that was neither the moment nor the true self.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus